Tendulkar: The “Dil Maange More” list -1
Although Sachin has completed 20 years in international cricket, I hope and believe he still has a few more left and this is not quite the time to write summaries of his career. There are many records that he has established or broken already. But it makes me wonder how people can say “he has broken all batting records”, as clearly there are many obvious ones that he is yet to break or achieve. So instead of going over his stats so far I am trying to highlight the things we fans want him to do. There is a reason for that. Tendulkar had a lean patch starting somewhere in 2004 that lasted till the World Cup of 2007. He did score a few hundreds during this time but never looked like the Tendulkar we knew. People, even players who are supposed to know about lean patches, started writing Tendulkar off. But then he came back to form in the tour of Ireland and England of 2007. Since then mostly he has been in great touch and has been even doing things he hasn’t done much before - like staying unbeaten in a big chase of fourth innings to win India a match, like he did in December 2008 against England at Chennai. So what fun it would be if he starts breaking those other records that are not in his list yet! The record that comes to mind immediately is a test triple hundred! But before we go there, Tendulkar definitely has had many attacking innings before - I am listing three that come to my mind and I chose these three because they represent three different match situations: So there are many matches where Tendulkar has played attacking but a huge double/triple hundred while playing like that has been missing. I know there are exceptions, but most of Tendulkar’s great centuries are scores around 150. As far as I remember none of his double centuries were very interesting to watch. He hasn’t scored even a big attacking double century yet. A triple hundred itself doesn’t seem to be a measure of greatness, but many great batsmen of the current generation have them - Sehwag, (DPMD) Jayawardene, Jayasuriya, Gayle, Younis Khan. Then there are Kallis, Ponting, Dravid, Mohammand Yusuf, Graeme Smith, Laxman who have none. I guess in general terms Tendulkar hasn’t had a huge attacking innings and it will be fantastic to see him do that!